30 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1882. 



must be spoken at any inconvenience or cost. Chartered, Forty 

 Years ago, " to advance the Science and promote the Practice of 

 Horticulture ;" it is your bounden duty to keep inviolate the 

 trust committed to you ; to maintain, untarnished, the reputation 

 achieved by your predecessors ; and to guard that Science, and 

 Practice, so jealously that their detriment may never be attri- 

 buted to you. 



That primacy of the shop ; the predominance of technicality, 

 so to speak ; had grown so painfully conspicuous in England, to 

 the manifest injury of the best interests of Floriculture ; that 

 " The Garden " was compelled to the subjoined deliverance. In 

 reply to Rev. S. Reynolds Hole, President of the National Rose 

 Society, whose contention was that, admitting the charms of 

 A^lpine or Scotch Roses, they must concede the superiority of 

 La France, Charles Lefebvre, and Marechal Niel ; — " The 

 Garden'''' asserts that 



"The interest of Rose Gardens is, we have reason to know, injured 

 by the exclusive attention paid to Show Roses." 



"Apart from single Roses, and such good shrubby roses as R. 

 Brunoni, there are a number of Roses thrown into undeserved neglect 

 owing to the never ending selection for showing purposes. Fortune's 

 Yellow, — excluded from the list of Show-roses sent out by the 

 National Rose Society ; aiid Fortune's Yellow, garlanding one of the 

 pillars in the kitchen garden at Blenheim, — a lovely sight, — explains 

 the ease." 



" Is not the National Rose Society composed almost wholly of 

 Exhibitors of Roses, or part Exhibitors? If so, — we can scai'cely 

 expect them to take so much interest in the Rose in the Gai'den, and 

 in making our homes and gardens more beautiful by her aid ; — though 

 in no way difficult. We love a good Rose as much as any Florist in 

 England ; but, in the course of many wanderings in quest of the 

 beautiful in gardens, the fact that the Rose, as a garden plant ; its 

 growth in a graceful as well as vigorous manner ; and the good eflects 

 in the garden landscape ; are things unseen, is constantly forced upon 

 us. On the other hand, nearly every garden is spoiled, except from a 

 comic point of view, by roses on broomsticks." 



" In short, the loveliest plant that graces this world of flowers is, 

 from a variety of causes, made the ugliest in habit and in its effects." 



The precisian errs to the excess of extreme fastidiousness. 

 This, of itself, may work no evil, as a guide for individual con- 

 duct : but it can enure only to the injury of a Society that should 



